Book Twenty Four 2014: 

 The Three by Sarah Lotz

Typical. You haven’t read anything great by a female author in ages and then four come along at once 🙂

The pitch for Sarah Lotz’s The Three is best left at one line – four planes crash across the world on the same day, there are only 3 survivors, all children…

The story is told in a fragmented style from inside the construct of a book that has been written about the events of what’s become known as Black Thursday soon after those events themselves.

You hear about what happened from people on the ground, people with the surviving children, people unconnected but with large, powerful interests that are driving events around the world the book is set in.

Honestly, telling a story like this means that Sarah Lotz has given herself a huge, uphill battle here. She pulls off all of the individual voices effortlessly while driving us along at speed even if once or twice I found myself wandering a bit as the vastly disparate strands were being slowly teased out.

It’s in the last 100 pages or so that The Three really flies and makes itself a must-read. Things all come together and wrap up, convincing you that it’s first one sort of story, then another, then another yet again. Was the survival of The Three a coincidence? A supernatural occurrence? The hand of God?

I pretty much always find myself being unsatisfied with endings of books. Not here. It finishes brilliantly.

It’s out on May 22nd, make a note and grab a copy.